There is a saying that fashion serves as a second skin. One that simultaneously reflects our notions and perceptions of self, while at the same time, reflecting larger societal norms and creative influences. It is these very intersections that the Hammer Museum’s new exhibition Refashioning: CFGNY and Wataru Tominaga explores. “Fashion has always been a conduit and mirror of current political and cultural issues and conversations,” emphasizes curator Erin Christovale. “It’s a way of amplifying one’s personal expression to the world.”

On view at the Hammer Museum from June 9 through August 4, the exhibition showcases work from the multi-disciplinary practices of artists and textile designers Concept Foreign Garments New York (CFGNY) and Wataru Tominaga through a series of site-specific installations. Merging garments, accessories, and textile works, the exhibition, which was first presented at the Japan Society in New York, uses the medium to examine gender and identity. CFGNY and Wataru Tominaga, based in New York and Tokyo respectively, punctuate this exploration with what they’ve dubbed as their shared “vaguely Asian aesthetics.” Here we speak with the exhibition artists about materiality, sustainability, creativity, and the boundaries of art and fashion. 

WATARU TOMINAGA

How do you think about the boundaries of art and fashion in your practice? How do you feel you’ve explored or transcended these in thinking about your work for Refashioning?‍

I am interested in how the value of an object can be fluid as a commodity and also as a work of art. My first idea for the installation was showing my clothes as visual art as a part of a large installation. My garments are hung in frames like a Kimono is hung on its special rack called IKOU(衣桁). The idea of showing a garment as such comes from the Japanese tradition, because often Kimono is hung neatly like a wall hanging art when it is not worn. Additionally, in gallery G2 I aim to create a space to show more materials, compositions and colors of my creations, where I attempt to express chaotic queerness through liberated colors and materials that defy conventional norms in fashion design which have binary expression of feminine and masculine. In gallery G3, I aim to demonstrate my fascination with layering images and objects to explore the composition of harmonized and organized chaos. The space will host a class on making a patchwork quilt with the queer community, aiming to produce a quilt with an artistic aura by hand stitching.

How do you think about materiality in your work, and more broadly, how do you think about form and function in your designs?‍

The materials I use for creating garments are like elements of constructing one’s mood, gender expression, and thought. And when I design my garments, I try to combine my personal mood and social mood that I perceive to make an ideal gender expression for each seasonal collection. The form and function of my garment are determined by the purpose of the creation, for example whether it is used for a fashion show, or exhibition, or performance, or daily life. In my work, a garment can be created for functional, ornamental and also conceptual purposes. I use it as a medium of expressing mood, identity, and thought.

Having studied and worked between the UK, Finland, and Japan, how do you feel your international experience has influenced your creative vision?‍

Living and studying in different countries has influenced my creative process significantly. I’ve noticed how fashion, art, and design play slightly different roles in each country. This experience has led me to contemplate the uncertainty surrounding the state of fashion and art.

How do you feel your identity is imbued in your work, and how do you feel fashion has the ability to shape one’s identity?

‍Designing a garment and making a garment and dressing up with a garment can express all different aspects of fashion. I think that my identity is imbued in different ways in each process. For example, my identity is shown as prints, colors, materials, shapes, choice of models, etc., when I design a garment for ready-to-wear. And my identity is more exaggerated when I make a garment by hand for more artistic practice of making an exhibition. 

CFGNY

How do you think about the boundaries of art and fashion in your practice? How do you feel you’ve explored or transcended these in thinking about your work for Refashioning?

‍Fashion is just one of the many mediums we work through as CFGNY; we consider ourselves artists who make garments. In addition to making clothes, we also make videos, photographs, sculptures, and installations, all of which will be present in the Refashioning show at the Hammer. We describe CFGNY as being “vaguely Asian,” a term that we coined to illustrate our interest in race and racialization. While cultural heritage and ethnic lineage plays a role in our experience of being Asian, with the term “vaguely Asian” we wish to draw attention to the fact that a large portion of what it means to experience Asianness in a diasporic context is to experience the act of being perceived as Asian. While all of us in CFGNY come from different ethnic backgrounds, we all intimately understand the form of alienation that comes from being racialized. This shared alienation is the basis for a very special and specific type of kinship that we look to build upon and nurture through our practice. Collaboration between the core members is very important for CFGNY, but we also invite our larger community to help us to draw out the contours of the “vaguely Asian.”

Because fashion operates on a visual register, similar to how race works (we understand a person’s race based on visual cues), we thought it apt to work in clothes to intervene and explore the concept of the “vaguely Asian.” We are also interested in creating an aesthetic community with our clothes that reaches beyond racial lines and strict identity markers, giving our creative output a life outside of a gallery or institution. As opposed to art, we like that our garments can occupy a very different relationship to its viewer or owner, a literal material mediation that exists between the bodies of the wearers and their larger communities in their everyday life.

We initially began our work for Refashioning by researching the Japan Society itself, which was the original venue for the exhibition. Although a longstanding NYC institution, the Japan Society’s origins and structure are unknown to most visitors, including ourselves at the time. By researching its archives, we found that it began as an elite American business organization founded in the early 20th century to influence economic and social interest in Japan via travel guides, luncheons for visiting dignitaries, news bulletins, and publishing commentary on foreign policy, among other forms of activities.

Through this research, we realized that over the past century, the Japan Society has played a significant role in producing a specific idea of Japaneseness, and by extension, Asianness, for a wealthy (white) East Coast American audience. When the show traveled to the Hammer, we knew that we wanted to expand the exhibition by researching the plethora of actual lived experiences of Japanese in America unfolding at the same time during the 20th century on the West Coast. We visited various historic sites and engaged with more personal and scholarly archives in LA. Returning to the idea of “vaguely Asian,” we were aware throughout both iterations of our work in this exhibition that narrativizing an entire people, whether as a business/social club, or as an artist collective conducting research, is an impossible task. By pinpointing moments of specificity in the vast tangle of lived experiences and proscriptive narratives or policies, we affirmed the “vagueness” of our project.

The idea of sustainability comes to mind when thinking about the term refashioning. How do you think about sustainability in your designs and work?‍

Sustainability and fashion are an issue mainly stemming from the large corporations that control most of the garment material output of the world. In their relentless drive for profit, companies from fast fashion all the way to luxury retailers, make decisions that only look at the effect to their bottom lines. This includes overproduction, shipping of materials, and unfair labor practices that exploit the underclass of the global south. The number of garments that CFGNY produces is only a very, very small speck of production that happens in the world, and our environmental footprint is minuscule because we do not engage in the practices that make most garment businesses environmentally antagonistic to the world.

Where have you been finding inspiration lately?

We are very inspired by the people around us, artists, writers and thinkers who we are in constant dialogue with. We have also been really inspired by the research in the Japanese American archives around Los Angeles we undertook to create the exhibition at the Hammer. Looking and studying the immigrant, multigenerational diasporic experience in a historical context has allowed us to recognize how problems we face today have an underlying structural feature that stems from events and thought processes that start in the past and gestate into a form we recognize today.